72 THE BOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



century. The work of Arthur Young practically put an 

 end to the open-field system. It is estimated that between 

 1830 and 1870 some three million acres of heavy land were 

 drained. 



The present appearance of rural districts with pastures and 

 meadows separated from each other by hedges is entirely different 

 from the type of scenery that must have existed when the " open- 

 field" system was prevalent. In early writers there is no mention 

 of hedges, now so characteristic a feature of our landscape. 

 Under the Saxons, meadowland used to lie open from hay harvest 

 to the following spring. When the grass began to grow the cattle 

 were driven out and the meadow fenced round and divided into 

 as many equal shares as there were families in the village ; each 

 man had his own haytime and housed his own crop ; that done, 

 the fences were thrown down and the meadow became again 

 common. Under the Normans, the open fields were merely 

 roughly marked off by turf balks, not by hedges. The first 

 attempt at enclosing the waste lands of the manor was made 

 in Edward Hi's reign, but not at all generally, and it is not until 

 the sixteenth century, with the publication of Fitzherbert's 

 Book of Surveying, that the recommendation to cut up the 

 land into small fields, each surrounded by its separate hedge, is 

 definitely recommended. The two counties that adopted this 

 advice were Essex and Suffolk ; outside these, England remained 

 almost totally unenclosed until the eighteenth century. The state 

 of things is very different to-day. The fields are often so small 

 and the hedges and the hedgerow trees so numerous, that a good 

 deal of land is incapable of profitable cultivation. In very small 

 fields with large trees the roots of the trees may penetrate so 

 far as to rob the crops of the manure intended for them. They 

 may screen the sun and wind too much from the hay or corn that 

 is being harvested. They prevent satisfactory drainage. It was 

 calculated about thirty years ago that the hedgerows in England 

 and Wales occupy not less than one million and a quarter acres ; 

 if the estimate included the area occupied by the roots, it would 

 be three millions. 



The references to hedges in the poetry of Wordsworth, who 

 wrote many of his nature poems during the last years of the 



